Media Memories

  
I have memories of Star Wars and Scooby Doo and of being so afraid of snakes I had to leave Raiders of the Lost Ark. I remember Family Ties, Who's the Boss, and Facts of Life. I remember the not too distant future of Fahrenheit 451, the mythic past of Dracula, and the land of the Wild Things. And they rattle and reassemble themselves as pieces of my history more real and tangible than actual memories for I have revisited them more frequently than the memories of fights, arguments, and tempers. Yet they are not real, which reminds me that the fights, arguments, and tempers might be real, but they are not truth.

The Boy Who Loved Snow Angels

 
There was this boy that loved making snow angels. He plopped right down in the freezing snow without a care in the world and energetically moved his arms and legs back and forth. He'd get up, look at his work, and then make another. By the time he was tired, there were dozens of snow angels, and he was sopping wet. That boy is now a man and hates the cold and the snow. He never makes snow angels. But the memory still makes him warm.

Paved Memories

There was a Witches' Tree -- old and dieing with long, dry spindly branches surrounded by sumac and tall grasses -- to which I escaped. I ran up the trunk and grabbed the nearest branch hoping it wouldn't snap beneath my weight. I climbed the tree with a satchel over my shoulder and ground a comfortable spot to sit. Then I wrote. Mostly it was nonsense or fantasies about being Jacob Wetterling.

The Witches' Tree was felled for a parking lot expansion, and the small woods that surrounded it was also torn down. The smell of composting earth is gone; the rough bark that scraped my knuckles is gone; the sticky resin of sumac is gone.

I visit this space frequently because it reminds me that nature is as temporary as childhood memories, and childhood memories are as easily paved over.

Stuck on Memories

  
I am stuck on certain memories that I know need to be shared, but it is difficult to write about them. These are not the moments of tragedy. Rather they are the moments of first connections and the mundane. It is important to recall these memories as they hold the narrative together.

They are also not real. That is what makes them so difficult to capture. They fall through the sieve of my pen. They are somewhere below the page.

Maybe it is the medium that loses them. They are not the things of words or ink.